Philips (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) is poised to shake up the very concept of patient home monitoring. Not content with simply devising devices that will send alerts to clinicians when a patient has had an adverse event, the company has developed a predictive analytics engine that can identify patients most likely to have health issues before those issues occur.

The Las Vegas casinos were teeming with activity last week, but the true bets from orthopedic surgeons who descended upon the city during the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons (AAOS) weren’t originating from the tables in their hotel lobbies. Smart money was being placed on what would happen regarding the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR). Ultimately the House would overwhelmingly pass the bill. But the Senate went into recess before making a final vote. For the uninitiated, in 1997, Congress adopted the SGR formula as part of the Balanced Budget Act. The idea was to control federal health care spending....

Exalenz Bioscience (Modi'in, Israel), a company that specializes in non-invasive medical devices for diagnosing and monitoring a range of gastrointestinal and liver diseases, reported new published data supporting the use of its point-of-care BreathID urea breath test for diagnosing Helicobacter pylori infection (H. pylori) in the emergency department (ED) setting. The study was published online in Annals of Emergency Medicine on March 24.